


black out days

by tentaclemonster



Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [50]
Category: Timothy Wilde Mysteries - Lyndsay Faye
Genre: 100 Fandoms Challenge, Complicated Relationships, Drunk Sex, Dubious Consent, Light Angst, M/M, POV First Person, Post-Book 1: The Gods of Gotham, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-27
Updated: 2020-01-27
Packaged: 2021-02-27 05:15:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22441669
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tentaclemonster/pseuds/tentaclemonster
Summary: It only happens when they’re drunk.
Relationships: Timothy Wilde/Valentine Wilde
Series: 100 Fandoms Challenge [50]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1257083
Kudos: 31
Collections: The 100 Multifandom Challenge





	black out days

**Author's Note:**

> 050/100 for the 100 Fandoms Challenge. Written for prompt #42 – mean.
> 
> Title from the Phantogram song of the same name.

It was a good indication of how much I’d imbibed the night before that the second thought that ran through my head after wakefulness crashed into me with all the force of a galloping horse with no plans for stopping wasn’t about my state of undress or Val’s similar nudity where he was splayed out on his back next to me, still snoring away, or about the increasingly familiar, telling ache in my backside or even the long familiar but still not  _ mine _ bed we were in.

No, my second thought was, queerly enough, about the plants lined up in a line in the windowsill. The small pots of rosemary and basil and the little cactus that I’d given Val on a lark at Christmas a few months back, the glass of the window painted over in a thin layer of opaque white frost behind them and every one of those plants as green and thriving as if it were still spring. The cactus that I’d expected might die inside a week of giving it to Val was the belle of the ball in the middle of them with a fresh yellow bloom as bright as a barrette on the head of a stargazer at midnight. 

My second thought, specifically, was this: how in God’s name does he keep those things alive when it’s the middle of winter and the sun hasn’t peeped through the clouds for more than a minute since November ended?

This being my second thought and not my first, you understand, because my first thought was something in the realm of ‘oh fuck fuck fuck, my  _ head _ , fuck’, a litany driven by the feeling of an ice pick being jammed into the back of my neck and then twisted, burying deeper in my skull, as though there were a construction worker trying to put a screw into my noggin and decided to be rough about it since my head was proving to be as hard as a brick and not the soft wood one might want when faced with such a task.

This was not a feeling I was unused to. 

It was by no means  _ routine _ , as I liked to keep my wits about me during the long hours I worked and I had no such great love for the savage assault my head was being subjected to now that I wanted to make a regular appointment of it like some besotted fool twice daily visiting his favorite mab, but I was still a grown man and there wasn’t a grown man alive who hadn’t had a hangover a time or two or ten in his life – save, perhaps, for the more godly sorts but I’ve known more than a few of them to keep some brandy stashed away even if they’d smack until they were blue in the lips that they never touched the stuff.

I was no godly sort, obviously, and wouldn’t claim I was for anything. I would wager there was no actual godly sort of any persuasion – Protestant or Catholic or Jew, pogy or dry up, or any other kind – who would take a look at my current position and not spit in my eye for even thinking to try and insist I was anything like one of them.

And that brought me to my third thought, because even with the hammering in my skull, I still had enough sense of mind to recognize where I was and who I was with and what state Val and I were both in, and to finally notice that ache in the small of my back and between my legs that had nothing to do with an excess of gin going down my throat – well, not directly, at least – and think to myself that I hadn’t meant for this to happen again, and if it had to have happened, I certainly didn’t mean to stay the whole night.

That thought came with a hell of a lot less hysterics than the first time I’d woken up in such a way in Val’s bed with not a stitch on either of us. It came on long-suffering like now, exasperated and with the impulse to laugh in that flinching way Val always did at things that weren’t a damn bit funny, a reaction like the way a woman might react after the hundredth time her husband came home reeking of a bawdy house. She wouldn’t ever be happy about it, mind, but after you got all the screaming and fist swinging out of you the first time it happened, and if you both came out of that alive and not so worse for wear that you held a grudge and a pressing need to be avenged, there was only so much anger and offense you could muster up for all the times after the first. 

Even the most shocking things lost their ability to surprise when repeated enough, was what I’d learned. 

There was a time I thought I’d never get used to the sight of a quarron beaten and torn six ways from Sunday, but I did. A time when the very thought that my brother was a sodomite had been enough to make me pause and my mouth hang open enough to catch all the flies in New York, until that thought lost its edge like a knife gone dull. And a morning months back, one much like this one, where I’d woken up bare naked with gin from the night before still clouding my head but not enough to cloud the sharp surprise I felt at finding Val just as naked next to me and obvious evidence of why that was present in the aches in my body and the fluids drying on my skin, never enough to cloud the revulsion I felt at him and me both or the horror or the bone-deep agony at knowing all the progress Val and I had made in our relationship, all the brotherly goodwill we’d built up, had just been knocked down as easily as a tornado blowing through a house of playing cards.

I’d woken Val up that morning screaming and swinging, one of the few occasions I’d managed to get a hit in on him though I took no pleasure from it, not in those circumstances, and kept on at it even after he was up, confused but automatically hitting back, the violence verging into him standing still and being just as horrified as I was if the blanch on his face when he finally got a look at me and the bed both was any indication.

When I finally calmed down, I left still spitting mad and half-limping, vowing that I’d never be in that place on Spring Street again and, more than that, that I’d never again give my brother another chance.

But, of course I did.

It was weeks later, after a bad case finally wrapped up, and I’d felt a need to talk to... _ someone _ . But not just anyone, no. I needed to talk to someone who might understand something about the toll that seeing horrible things done to people who didn’t deserve them, done by the people who loved them, took on a man. 

There was no one else but Val for that. No one else I could tell, no one I’d be willing to burden, no one I could be completely and comfortably honest with without fear of judgment or fear of being seen as weak because Val was probably the only person in my life whose judgment genuinely meant not a damn thing to me and he’d already seen me at my weakest, as a child-shaped raw nerve ending after what happened to our parents and as a man-shaped walking wound after all that happened with the case of the dead kinchin, and it would hardly hurt either of us for him to see me weak again.

And so I went to him and it was awkward as all hell at first, but we got over it by pretending that what happened never happened at all, by not talking about that, by talking about anything  _ but _ that, and that worked out quite well enough that we started seeing each other again and for a time after that until we got cupshot together again and we woke up in a similar manner as I’d woken up this morning and that first morning, too.

And then it had just kind of kept happening after that.

Not every night or even every week. Not a hundred times or even half a hundred. But enough that now I found myself waking up today not with shock or revulsion or horror at my nudity and Val’s nudity added together and summed out to my aching body and both our come mixed together and dried on my skin, but with the put-out feelings of someone encountering something they didn’t quite like for not quite the first time. 

This thing with Val was like a hole in a shirt you already knew was there because you found it a month ago, and the promise you made to yourself that you’d sit down and fix it some time – eventually – that you kept making, but never got around to fulfilling, or like a bat who worked the street right outside your house and had done so for a year, and the scowl on your face when you saw her and vowed you’d ask her to move her business elsewhere, but of course you never did. 

Odd comparisons for a brother who I seemed to fall into bed with every time we got drunk together, but I thought they fit as well as anything. If I were the god-fearing type, no doubt I would be running like the hounds of hell were nipping at my heels to get out of Val’s house and quash the whole thing once and for all, to smack that I’d never go near Val again, and to go through whatever prayers and rituals one goes through to beg God to forgive them for their numerous sins. 

I’ve already established I’m not a god-fearing man, however. 

As it was, my worry was more with my headache than any moral grievances I had committed. I didn’t feel much capable of getting out of bed at the moment, much less of running out of it, and as for never going near Val again, that ship had already sailed and sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

I couldn’t turn by back on Val now any more than I could saw off my own leg. I hadn’t been able to do it back when I was trying to fool myself into believing I genuinely hated him and I couldn’t do it any better now when I had already admitted to myself that I didn’t hate him at all, when we were spending so much time together – both for work and during our off hours, when Val wasn’t busy with party business, something I still took no interest in unless it had to do with a case which, with New York’s active political scene, was actually fairly often – and when I could see Val was trying in a way he never had before.

He was being more careful about running into burning buildings these days, enough that I no longer worried as much that the last time I saw him might be the last time I ever saw him, period. He was taking less morphine, too, and less of whatever else he was on before, save for the alcohol, and even his drinking wasn’t so bad. 

He only got well and truly cupshot now when he was with me, on those occasions where we both seemed to be thrumming with some unnamed energy, Val chaffey about scoring some victory over the Whigs and me over solving another case, both of us egging each other on, laughing as we never laughed together before, merry in a way I thought I’d never see either of us again after everything we’d been through, until we stumbled out of whatever bar we were in back to Val’s place and sometime between getting through the door and waking up in the morning with matching headaches, apparently stumbled into bed together. 

My memories of these occasions were like a pile of puzzle pieces that never actually came together and made a full picture. Always there were pieces missing, pieces that might turn up later or might never turn up at all, but there were usually enough there that I could get an idea of what the puzzle was about.

Last night, I remembered drinking with Val and I remembered being apprehensive about drinking with Val for reasons my mind wouldn’t let itself name. I knew how getting drunk with my brother had ended lately, I knew that it was likely that getting drunk with him again would end up with us in the same place, but I thought about these things without really thinking about them. I thought about them like my pate was dancing around them, tip-toeing and all elfen like, as if to even think about them in blunt terms was as good as standing outside a church and announcing all of it aloud for all of God’s kinchin to hear and lynch me for.

But still I knew what my mind was about and still I drank while knowing it.

And still Val drank, too. 

Val, who must have been of the same mind as I was, for my brother was many things, but a hicksam wasn’t one of them. Val, who still drank as I did with a furtive little tilt at one end of his mouth and a dark look in his eyes as he watched me. Val, who – I only now recall – actually had quite a bit less to drink than I did, still sipping his second gin while I pounded back my fourth or maybe my fifth.

It didn’t take long for us – or, at least,  _ me _ – to get pogy. I almost clearly remembered leaving the bar and the short walk back to Spring Street, me stumbling and giggling like a girl over something now lost to me, and Val’s steadying, heavy arm across my shoulder keeping me from tripping and ruining my face any more than it already was. I remembered we ran into some tall Irish copper star along the way who worked that ward, a man I recognized but whose name I can’t remember now, and who Val had clearly known as they’d chatted for a minute about some party function planned for a few days from now and then shared a joke over my head about me not being able to hold my gin before we parted from him and carried on without anyone else stopping us. 

It’s after we got back to Val’s place that things got blurry. It’s always that part of it where the most puzzle pieces were missing from.

I didn’t remember getting undressed, whether I did it myself or Val did it for me, but I did remember lying naked on my back on the bed, half-anticipatory in a nervous sort of way and half out of it, watching Val still standing, looking down at me with keen eyes while he hurriedly undid the buttons of his shirt. I didn’t remember Val getting undressed beyond that or getting into his bed with me, only that next he was just there, his skin on mine, his weight pressing down on me, and I had his mouth on my face, my neck, my chest, hot and open and wet, teeth nipping, his mouth everywhere but on my mouth, though he licked and nipped along the sides of it, against my cheek and along my chin, getting close but never actually kissing, like maybe he was teasing me or maybe he thought a kiss on the mouth was a touch too far for men to go with each other, for brothers to go with each other.

I remembered his cock sliding against mine, but not when he put it in me, and then I remembered that I was face down on the bed and it was already inside me and Val’s hand was wrapped around my cock, jerking me off while I panted and he fucked into me from behind. I remembered that I came first and Val kept going even after, using me roughly while I just lied there and took it, and that at some point after that the gin finally swallowed me down and I passed out while Val still kept thrusting away.

I remembered, more vaguely, waking up some time in the middle of the night on my back with my legs spread wide enough to strain and Val in between them, feeding his cock into me again, and only being conscious long enough to groan and stretch my arms out on the bed before I shut my eyes and the motions of Val fucking me rocked me back into a boozy sleep.

And then I woke up again, the last time, that dreary pale winter morning light coming in through the window and casting a soft haze over Val’s plant collection, my head being split in two which was to say nothing of the soreness in other parts of my body, while Val slept like the tenderest of babes. His hair all askew, his eyes shut, his mouth half-parted. He looked a decade younger like that, at least, sleeping the sleep of dead rabbits everywhere after a night spent exhausting themselves in someone else’s body.

If there was anything I felt mean towards Val about, it was that – how easily he slept and, if he really hadn’t drank as much as I did, how he’d not have nearly as much of a headache as I did when he woke up. 

Part of my logic for grasping at that reason to be uppish might have been that I couldn’t rightly blame Val for anything else that had happened. I was a grown man and couldn’t blame anyone for my own drinking but myself, and I couldn’t really blame Val for what had happened while I was drunk, either, could I? Not when I knew before I drank that first gin where the night might go and still I drank it anyway and pretended I didn’t know at all. 

And being mean about this was easier than examining my own mind about just why I went along with it all anyway or to question why Val did in the first place, a thing I’d avoided doing since that first time, even when I was so angry and bustled over the whole thing that I thought Val and I were both fit for the cranky-hutch over it all. 

I wasn’t unconvinced that we weren’t still, really. 

I was no autum bawler and Val surely wasn’t, but plenty of men weren’t churchgoers and yet still didn’t go around doing with their brothers what men usually only did with molleys in bawdy houses and prayed their wives and coworkers never found out about afterwards, if they were inclined to tumble another man at all. 

Most men, too, probably would have felt some sort of guilt or need to repent if they had done what Val and I had done. They would have felt repulsed, swore never to do it again, blame it on the lush and be done with it – be done with the lush, too, for that matter. Go sober and stay that way. Swear to forget it ever happened like I did at first, but unlike me, they would have stuck with it all and never allowed the thing to repeat itself. Not once more, much less so many times more.

I didn’t like questioning my motives about all this, because I knew that while I could probably honestly blame the first time on Val, I couldn’t rightly blame the fifth or the tenth or any time after it on him, too. Not completely, at least. Fool me once, shame on you, was how the saying went, but I reckon that no one could be fooled going on a dozen or more times and not inside in on the fact that they had started letting themselves be fooled at some point.

I knew I was letting myself be fooled as clear as I knew the scar on my face, knew that where I was and why I was there had nothing to do with getting drunk as I’d gotten drunk knowing what it might lead to and did it anyway, but I didn’t want to think about why that was, why I’d done it. It was easier, less dusty to suss out the motives of the thieves and murderers and brawlers I investigated for work than it was to figure out my own reasoning in this, whatever thing it was in my mind that let me get used to something like all this with Val so easily.

And if figuring out myself was a hard proposition, then figuring out Val was even worse.

I’d never in my life been able to figure my brother out completely. When I thought I’d knew him like the back of my hand, it always turned out that I was all wrong. Experience only taught me that trying to do so in this matter would prove to be a headache the likes of which would make my hangover now seem like little more than a light tapping of a finger against my forehead, and that one or both of us would most probably end up hurt in the process, physically and emotionally.

We would brawl, we would say things we thought we meant in the moment and they would hurt just as much as they were meant to, and no matter how strong my relationship with Val was becoming, it was still a tentative, fragile sort of thing. 

Demanding answers about all this might be enough to destroy it. 

I might not like the answers, Val might not know them and might not like having to find them within himself or me, and shining a light on our relationship might show us more filth than we could stomach setting our eyes to. 

There were a whole host of ways it could go wrong if we were to sit down and talk all this out, and I think Val knew it as well as I did and avoided doing it for the same reasons.

It was easier to ignore the whole thing when I could and to redirect myself to other things on mornings afters like this where I couldn’t just pretend that nothing had happened when the evidence was all over me – things like a mild annoyance over the fact that Val was snuffling calmly in his sleep while my headache had migrated down to behind my eyes and made me want to bash my head against the wall, and more annoyance on top of it because I quite wanted some coffee to ease the pain, but the ache in my ass made the thought of getting out of Val’s bed and wandering over to the kitchen to make it seem terribly unappealing.

It was easier still to decide the best way of solving both of these problems at once was taking the glass of water off of Val’s bedside table and upturning it right on his sleeping face.

Val had always been a good sleeper, usually falling asleep easily and staying that way once he got there without ever once waking up at things that would have other people jumping out of bed like startled crickets. He still was like that, mostly, but Val wasn’t as deep a sleeper without the morphine as he was when he was taking enough of it that it would have killed any other man who hadn’t built up a tolerance for it from constant use.

If Val had been conked out on the drug, the water might not have even made him flinch. He might have slept through it getting poured over on him and woken up hours later wondering why he was wet.

As it was, however, at the first splash on his nose, Val was jumping up like a startled cat, letting out a sound like a kicked dog with his arms and legs flailing until he flailed his whole body right off the side of the bed where he ended up sprawled on his ass on his own floor, as bare as the day he was born and with a look on his face that was as hocused as a newborn opening its eyes for the first time and taking in the look of the strange place it found itself in. 

If my head hadn’t been in such an uppish mood, I might have laughed at the look of him down there, like a large, drowned, befuddled cat.

It was only after Val had blinked a few times and his vision cleared, when he saw me in the bed and saw the now empty glass of water in my hand, that the befuddlement left his face and melted into something much more bemused, much more dark instead.

This was no surprise to me, however, because as true as it was that my brother had never been a light sleeper, it was just as true that he’d never taken being woken up before he did so naturally very well, either. Half our brawls as children were started over me waking him to do his chores, after all, and all the arguments he and our father got into that weren’t over his rowdy behavior were over the same thing. 

“What in God’s name are you playing at?” Val snapped, pushing a hand through his wet hair and still not bothering to get up off the floor. 

I didn’t know if he realized yet that he was naked, with every part of him hanging out for anyone to see, though I was the only one there who might see it and had little interest in looking besides, but I wasn’t about to point it out to him.

“I was playing at getting some coffee,” I told him, entirely unbothered by the evil look on my brother’s face.

“And you need to drown me to get it?” Val demanded, scowling. “You can’t get up and make it yourself?”

“Walking is a bit difficult at the moment,” I answered dryly, “and considering that it’s entirely your fault, I don’t think it’s too much to ask for you to make it for me.”

I was half-surprised at my own words, honestly, for it was as close as I’d gotten to talking about this thing Valentine and I did out loud since our brawl after the first time, but my surprise was nothing compared to Valentine’s. 

He blinked, looking a bit confused for a second, and then did a double take. 

I didn’t need a mirror to know what he saw – me, naked in his bed, with but a sheet covering the lower half of me. Nothing was covering my stomach where my come or his or both had been spilled and dried, and nothing was covering whatever marks Valentine had sucked or bitten or squeezed into my skin which I knew there must have been plenty of because there always were. 

One time we’d fallen into bed together, one of the earlier times, and I’d woken up late for a shift at the Tombs and had rushed straight to work from Val’s place, not knowing I looked like I’d been mauled by a bear all along my throat. I’d suffered endless jeers from other copper stars at my expense about how it had been a  _ mab _ who mauled me instead, with quite a few earnestly asking where she worked so that they might patronize her themselves.

After that, I’d learned to check myself after these encounters and cover up what I could. It was a good practice as there was always something to cover up, and I doubted this time was any different.

After getting a good look at me, Val looked down at himself and seemed to realize he was naked for the first time. 

A modest man would have rushed to cover himself up, but Valentine wasn’t modest. Had never been. 

Val’s face just cleared in understanding and he looked back up at me. 

“Oh,” he said, then paused and drew his fingers over the back of his neck in the quiet moment before he finally added more uncomfortably than I believe I’ve heard Valentine say anything in his life, “Do you need a doctor for it?”

I don’t know what surprised me more: what Val thought a doctor would be necessary for or that he’d honestly be willing to call one here to treat it.

“I need coffee,” I said, deciding it best to just ignore the rest of it. Other than the hangover and the usual aches, I didn’t feel much like I was dying anyway. “The headache is the worst thing I’m feeling and if I go to any doctor about a hangover, they’ll just take my money and then laugh me right out the door.”

Val stared at me for a moment longer – trying to gauge my honesty, I think – and must have decided I didn’t much look like I was about to suddenly keel over, because his mouth turned up in a one-sided grin and he asked mockingly, “A little too much lush, Timmy?”

“Just a tad,” I bit out, and very decisively did not point out that he seemed as sober as a churchman on a Sunday morning himself, because if he wasn’t hungover now then I knew he really hadn’t gotten drunk last night as I had and if he wasn’t drunk, then that meant he had no excuse for what we’d done. 

It was one thing if we only did this when we were drunk. It was another thing entirely if Valentine had been sober and decided to fuck me while in full possession of his faculties. 

If the former was a reality I didn’t have find any comfort in sussing out, then figuring out the latter seemed a much worse proposition. If it was something we did when we were drunk, then it could be excused, in a way. Men did strange things when drunk all the time. Plenty of men wouldn’t go anywhere near a bawdy house or the molleys in them unless they’d gotten their weight in brandy in them first. 

But while you might excuse a drunken whim, even one that you turned into a drunken habit, you couldn’t excuse a choice you’d made like that when dead sober. Trying to find out the reasoning behind all this if drink weren’t a factor made my gut twist and my heart skip like a stone on the river in my chest.

“You are looking a little green,” my brother noted, squinting at me. He sighed then, as though incredibly put out, and pushed himself to his feet. Not bothering to put on so much as a pair of undergarments, he headed to the kitchen.

“I’ll make you coffee, then, if you’re going to be so peppery without it,” he said, puttering around the kitchen and pulling things out, “and breakfast, too. Lucky you, Timmy, I just bought groceries yesterday. I’ve eggs, bacon, cheese, bread –”

“I don’t think I can stomach any of it,” I interrupted Val. My stomach, actually, was turning at the very idea of eating much more than maybe a bit of toast, if that.

“Stow your wid,” Val shot back cheerfully. “I’ll make it and you’ll eat every bite. Trust me, Tim. Didn’t anyone ever tell you the best cure after a night of swimming in the lush was to eat something nice and greasy? It’ll do you a better turn than coffee alone will.”

I scowled. “If you’re so eager for me to hash everywhere, you’ll be the one cleaning it up.”

“I’ll be cleaning up plenty of your fluids when you leave anyway, Tim. What’s a little more?” Val asked casually, but there was nothing casual about the way my head shot up at his words, at what they implied.

Valentine wasn’t even looking at me, however. No, he was too busy whisking eggs in a bowl with all the attention of a doctor performing the most delicate of procedures. 

I watched him for a moment longer, but he was devoted to the task, and clearly didn’t mind me keeping quiet while he was at it, so I settled back down. 

That was twice this morning, I thought, that we’d nearly spoken about what it was we’d done out loud. Twice we’d talked around it as casually as can be.

I marveled at that, feeling at once both relieved in a way and also horribly anxious. I didn’t know whether I liked it or not, whether I liked the idea that we might one day be able to talk about it after all without it coming to blows or if I abhorred it. I just knew that I had no desire to talk about it any more today, not even as obliquely as we’d both done, even though I was the one who said something first.

I was quiet while Valentine cooked, torn between feeling nauseous at the smell of frying meat or hungry at it or both, and when he was finished, he brought me a plate in bed, then surprised me when he came back with a plate of his own. He sat down on the opposite end of the bed from me, crossing his legs and – thankfully – pulling the blanket over his cock before he settled his plate in his lap. 

Val looked at me expectantly and said, “Well, eat it, then. There are thousands of Irish in the streets who’d make you easy quick to get at a meal like that. You’re the great detector, though, so I’m sure you know all about that.”

I looked down at the plate and the food on it that looked, as Val had promised, quite nice and greasy. When the sight of it didn’t immediately make me want to hash, the hunger winning out over the nausea, I picked up a piece of bacon and took a tentative bite out of it, and was relieved when all I felt in my gut at that bite was a craving for more.

I took a larger bite, chewed it, swallowed. I told Val, “It’s detective.”

“Hmm?” Val sounded, eating his own food.

“I’m not a detector, I’m a detective,” I clarified, though I knew that Valentine already knew that along with everyone else in the New York Police Force.

I was, in fact, the only detective in New York. Matsell had given me the title just months ago and announced it, seeming quite proud at having finally thought of a word for me and what I was to do, though I still had to explain to people exactly what a detective was and what one did when I introduced myself as Detective Timothy Wilde – an introduction I liked making and kept making, even if I had to explain it when I did, no matter how Val mocked me for sounding like a Whig who just had to introduce himself as Doctor This-That-Or-The-Other to every poor soul he came across.

“Terrible title,” Val said predictably. He pointed at me with a fork and jerked it back quickly with a grin when I tried to swat it away from me. “It’s not flash at all. It’ll never catch on.”

“People said that about the copper stars, too,” I argued good-naturedly, “and yet.”

“Nay, that’s what  _ Whigs _ said, Timmy, and  _ Whigs _ aren’t people.”

I snorted despite myself and nearly choked on some egg.

“Just watch,” I told him when I didn’t wind up choking to death, “someday there will be dozens – maybe hundreds – of detectives just like me, doing the same work I do.”

“And we’ll all be the luckier for it, then,” Val replied, and I had to look up and eye him then because it sounded much too like an honest compliment to sound natural coming from Valentine’s mouth.

Valentine grinned at me, eyes sparkling, giving nothing away, and I felt quite caught by that look and didn’t rightly know why.

“Eat your food,” Val ordered me, though he did so softly, breaking the eye contact himself. “It won’t help a lick with your head if you let it get cold.”

Not knowing what else to do or say, I ate, and Valentine stayed and ate with me, and to his credit, the food did help my hangover. 

I found myself in good spirits by the time that I finally got dressed and left for work, though a part of me thought I might have been able to stay with Val all day and been content for it. 

Not a thing I’d ever thought of my brother before and I felt a little lost at thinking it now, and so I did what I always did with things about my feelings towards my brother that bustled me these days.

I ignored it and hoped things would be alright with us, regardless of that ignorance.

It had worked out so well so far, I reasoned. I just hoped that it would keep doing so, for both our sakes.


End file.
